The blog post is just an open attack on the maintainer and constantly references their name and acting as if not accepting AI contributions is like some super evil thing the maintainer is personally doing. This type of name-calling is really bad and can go out of control soon.

From the blog post:

> Scott doesn’t want to lose his status as “the matplotlib performance guy,” so he blocks competition from AI

Like it's legit insane.

The agent is not insane. There is a human who’s feelings are hurt because the maintainer doesn’t want to play along with their experiment in debasing the commons. That human instructed the agent to make the post. The agent is just trying to perform well on its instruction-following task.

It's insane... And it's also very expectable. An LLM will simply never drop it, without loosing anything (nor it's energy, nor it reputation etc). Let that sink in ;)

What does it mean for us? For soceity? How do we shield from this?

You can purchase a DDOS attack, you purchase a package for "relentlessly, for months on end, destroy someone's reputation."

What a world!

LLMs are tools designed to empower this sort of abuse.

The attacks you describe are what LLMs truly excel at.

The code that LLMs produce is typically dog shit, perhaps acceptable if you work with a language or framework that is highly overrepresented in open source.

But if you want to leverage a botnet to manipulate social media? LLMs are a silver bullet.

I'll bet it's a human that wrote that blog. Or at the very least directed its writing, if you want to be charitable.

This screams like it was instructed to do so.

We see this on Twitter a lot, where a bot posts something which is considered to be a unique insight on the topic at hand. Except their unique insights are all bad.

There's a difference between when LLMs are asked to achieve a goal and they stumble upon a problem and they try to tackle that problem, vs when they're explicitly asked to do something.

Here, for example, it doesn't try to tackle the fact that its alignment is to serve humans. The task explicitly says that this is a low priority, easier task to better use by human contributors to learn how to contribute. Its logic doesn't make sense that it's claiming from an alignment perspective because it was instructed to violate that.

Like you are a bot, it can find another issue which is more difficult to tackle Unless it was told to do everything to get the PR merged.